Grandfather Says: Grandfather’s House and Custom Built Stairs

When he was younger he and his friends (most now departed) had fun together, visiting each other’s houses en mass on Saturday nights.

The stairway down from the front hall to four bedrooms, a sitting room and a bathroom downstairs was the last project Grandfather built in his house. He and his friends could get going pretty good at times, so he built a thirteen-step circular stairway strong enough to hold two revelers per step:

Grandfather welds the tangs supporting the stair treads on the center post

The wood parts and construction props cut out beforehand.

The pipe uprights depending from the laminated railing support the tread’s outsides.

Done!

Actually, Grandfather doesn’t know why he builds things so strong. Grandfather went to Michigan State College (now University) on the GI bill. Great-Great Grandfather was general manager of the Chevrolet gray iron foundry in Saginaw, Michigan and he was pleased that Grandfather went to Michigan State, rather than the University of Michigan. Grandfather said Michigan State’s engineers were more practical. Great-Great Grandfather said he hired a U of M graduate to design a conveyor and it was too fragile and collapsed.

So, maybe that’s why Grandfather overbuilds — it’s because he didn’t go to the University of Michigan …

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About the Author: RD Blakeslee is an octogenarian from West Virginia who built his net worth by only investing in that which can be enjoyed during acquisition and throughout life, as opposed to papers in a drawer, like stocks and bonds. You can read more about him here.

After my first wife died (you can read about her in the URL posted at the end of each of these articles – see the commentary there), I was determined to terminate my grief as soon as I could. Before I go on let me say that did not mean putting her out of mind – I think about her in love and awe every day. The one we happily call “my latest wife”, whom I married later, talk about her and her presence in the house.

With that background, back to the main point: I hired a therapist to help me and he pointed out that the house was my monument and said that if I had to live in my monument to be happy I might have trouble attracting a lady-love to the mountains of (shudder) West Virginia.

But I found one. She had spent much time in the Alps and loves it here.

Several erstwhile immigrants have come and gone over the years I’ve been here. Early on, the occasional hippie discovered why his grandparents left such places, when his bamboo strut and polyethylene “structure” blew flat in the winds of November.

One more substantial house, built with money the builder said he found inside the wall of an earlier, out-of-state house of his, burned down and his new-age barn was torn down after he went elsewhere.

For an o’er-arching perspective on monuments, read “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

That’s a beautiful staircase! You’re very ingenious to think of supporting the treads with the railing! I’ve seen some spiral staircases designed with an integral tread and tube that slides down over a solid pole, in which case the railing doesn’t need to be structural. Great idea!
Now for my burning question, what happened to all of the body panels on your tractor in the picture?

Well, that little Sears tractor started out as a normal (if there’s anything “normal” in my life) mowing and towing machine. Its engine wore out and I replaced it with a cast iron industrial engine running a generator, which you can see mounted on the front of the tractor. The sheet metal wouldn’t fit over the big-tall new engine and was discarded.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: My degree is a BA in production management.

As Len can tell you, getting an engineering degree ain’t easy and, opportunist that I am, I discovered that the Patent Office at that time needed examiners so badly that they would hire college graduates with any degree, provided they had a threshold number of credits in mathematics, science and/or engineering, which I had accumulated. So I switched to Business Administration. The rest is history.

Hi, Sandy – Well, it’s hard to say – so much depends on what’s considered time spent on the stairway.

Acquiring all the tools over the years, salvaging walnut logs from the forest floor and making them into panels, pulling down the old barn for the oak to make the stair treads and waiting for the glue to dry between laminate applications to the railing, reworking old white oak fence boards for the laminate sections and sawing out their curves on my bandsaw, cutting he tangs and welding them to the centerpost …

Hard as I think about it, it’s not like the stone wall was and I really can’t make a useful guess.

Sandy, the blog is Len’s and so far he has seen fit to keep “Grandfather Says” going (he did fire me as an editor once. I found a mistake in one of his blogs and misspelled a word in a three-word suggested edit).

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